Staging Desire: Interview with a Porn Star

Do you like what you do?  Don’t you feel bad?  

“Yes.  Maybe, but I like it, a lot.  There are subtleties, consequences, the whole range of sensations.  Nothing left out or denied, good and bad, undone our distinctions, dissonance a kind of harmony.  Options, vistas, the other side.  Always.  But don’t get lost, someone told me.”  

I liked it, kept going back.  Not once, not just me.  There’s always a specific you, sometimes not, but always me.  There has to be—I don’t have to tell you.  It gets more complicated and easier, cause there you are, all spread out, dancing on pins.  Ballerinas, giants, acrobats, bears, lizards, freaks.  So many.  How do you do it?  

“Sometimes I get messed up, but mostly I just relax, let go.  There are risks, fear.  The first time he said, ‘Just forget, close eyes, bend back, abandon body but not the soul.  Keep hold of senses, keep danger from your heart.’”  

Barely human, distortions of flesh and limb, contorted frame and form.  Desire’s demands shape you into grotesque unions, beautiful horrors—power, joy, humiliation.  You circulate capital, make it go round.  We don’t know who you are, what you’re made of, but we made you just the same.  A new machine, all of you, and us.  You bear its signs with joy, an animal in a show, unconcerned about its cage, a calf on their altar, dispensing living self to all consumers.  Are you free?  

“Don’t say I’m over-determined?  I hate that.  Choice is problematic—it’s hard not to know.  I participate, but there’s something left out, about how, about what I do.  You know who I am, why I do it?  Cash works, excludes the will—these greedy fucks, grubbing dirty pricks in profits jacking off.  I get off, too, always have.  You’re going to get off on this aren’t you?  Soon as I leave you’ll unzip.  But I decide the terms.  I say yes, and I say no.  I might, but you pay.  Listen, I do these things but I don’t pay.”  

Why do it, what you do with your body, with all these people?  

“Thing is, you don’t even want me, us.  You really want each other.  You’d be better off doing each other.  You’re the ones who create desire for terror and pain—your desires drive me.  Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?”  

What do you feel or think?  Do you cry?  

“You want me to say I deserve to be treated like a body without meaning?  That we desire not to be?  I desire nothing, and everything.  No, not everything.  I desire beauty, luminosity.  You’re staring.”  

The only word to give you fails to adhere and names you not.  A mist surrounds you, on the other side of heaven, where I cannot reach.  

“A halo?  We stand up and get cut down.  We make sons and daughters to feed endless desires.  We tell ourselves about ourselves.”